


i'll take you on, i'll take you all on

by beanarie



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Canon Disabled Character, Disabled Character of Color, Gen, just FYI, mention of sexual assault, this is my third attempt to incorporate watson's leg injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:52:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan Watson has just returned to school after taking some time off to recover from a tragic accident. Gregson, her favorite English teacher, has a new pet project, a British kid who can't seem to stop getting in trouble. Together they... serve detention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll take you on, i'll take you all on

It took roughly eleven minutes from the first kid saying that she shouldn't be in gym with the rest of them for Joan to get herself an in-school suspension.

The teacher didn't want to. She tried to sound stern about sending Joan to see the school social worker. Joan shook her head.

"That was assault, what I just did," Joan said. "Treat me any different than you would anyone else here, and the next basketball goes right for _your_ face." And then she took her cane, and she walked to the Vice Principal's office.

She didn't stumble. But then, that was why she'd stayed out so long, to make sure the prosthetic wouldn't let her down when there were people watching.

~

On the first morning of Joan's five day sentence, Gregson appeared at the door of the in school suspension room. "Keep your head down and that mouth shut," he said, pushing a boy over the threshold. "You'll be out of here in five days if you can manage not to make things worse. Okay? I'd _really_ like it if you didn't get yourself expelled your first semester."

"Who's monitoring?" the boy asked, and Gregson stared until the kid ducked his head.

"As far as you're concerned, it's Her Royal Highness the Queen. You're going to be on your best behavior." Then he caught sight of Joan. "Joan? Joan Watson? What are you-" As the bell rang, his harried expression ratcheted up two notches. "You know what? We'll be talking later, you and me."

"Fine," Joan said. She didn't intend to bat her eyes and smile like a smartass. It kind of happened on its own. Gregson pointed at her, opening his mouth like he wanted to say more, and left.

The boy settled in the second row of the lecture hall. As he dug into the back pocket of his tight jeans and came out with a pen, she noticed he didn't have any books with him. Punk.

A young man with a purple tie and a beard carried a stack of handouts and textbooks into the room. Joan had never seen him before. He looked like the latest in a long line of student teachers who came there to learn their craft and moved on once they figured out how stingy the superintendent was with actual tenured positions.

"What are you doing?" he asked the boy.

"I am illustrating my arm," the boy said honestly, his head bowed, the pen clutched tightly in his fist.

"Well, quit it. That's not what you're here for." The student teacher dropped about two thirds of his stack on the boy's desk. "I figured you'd, uh, 'forget' to bring your schoolwork, so I volunteered to get it for you."

"I'm touched you put forth such effort for me." The boy added another swirl to his forearm.

"Listen, don't make us call your guardian all the way out here again."

"Ms. Hudson is engaged," the boy muttered.

"Wonderful as it is, her finding a man to spend the rest of her life with," the teacher snarked, pretending not to understand. "That's got very little to do with our current situation."

Joan liked this one. Maybe he'd stick around for a while.

He looked over at her. "Joan Watson, right? I'm Mr. Bell. I went and got the assignments from the classes you haven't gotten to attend yet. Usually I teach Civics, but this week I'll be with you guys in the ISS room."

Joan accepted her stack of classwork and started separating it into piles by subject. "They took you out of your classes for a whole week?"

Bell shrugged. "It happens."

"They didn't think it was right to inflict me on some hapless substitute for an extended period of time." The boy sounded like he was smiling, though she couldn't see his face to be certain.

Bell rolled his eyes just long enough for Joan to catch him at it. "Kid, I would rather meet you in a dark alley than that eighty year old security guard they got watching the back entrance near the music wing. Crack open one of those books before I convince the higher-ups to extend your stay another week."

~

Part of their punishment was being banished from the cafeteria. Joan had a brown bag, so it wasn't a problem. The other kid, unsurprisingly, had nothing. Bell gave him a look and granted him ten minutes to grab something from the caf. He returned with a chocolate milk, three bananas, and a container of ice cream, and he sat down next to Joan. 

"Happened in a fire, didn't it? Where you lost your leg."

She swallowed a mouthful of celery and peanut butter, took another bite, and swallowed that before she responded. "Why are you asking like someone didn't tell you the whole story?" 

"No one told me," he said, and he downed a third of his banana with one bite.

~

At the end of the day, as Joan exited, plotting her route to Gregson's classroom, he spoke up again.

"It was the vitamin E oil that gave you away, if you're curious."

"What?"

"I recognized the scent of one particular high-end brand. Commonly used to combat the signs of aging--which, you're seventeen _and_ you look approximately two years younger, so, unnecessary for at least a decade--and burn scars."

Joan frowned. He nodded and let the outgoing crowd swallow him up on his way through the double doors.

~

No one did unimpressed like Gregson. "You got a week's suspension your second day back for attacking a student and threatening a teacher. Looks like somebody's got something to prove."

Joan dug her fingers into the armrest and glanced out the window at the nature club and their ceremonial tree planting. "What's the deal with that English kid?" she asked.

"Oh, Sherlock Holmes?" He settled back in his chair. "...Huh." His eyebrows knitted together. "You know. You two might actually be _good_ for each other."

~

Sherlock didn't have lunch the second day, either. It was becoming a pattern, along with disappearing to the caf and sitting next to her upon his return.

"Cheese-stick?" he offered. He had ten of them.

"How do you know exactly how old I am?" No one ever got Joan's age right. People still confused her for a freshman, at least they used to. She stuck out a little more now.

"Gregson knew you, but not that you'd been suspended. If you were in his class, he would have been notified so as not to expect your presence. Ergo, he taught you last year. Given his astonishment at finding you chained and bound in the closest thing this facility has to a prison cell, you're an honors student, which would mean Advanced Placement Composition, only open to high-achieving juniors."

She stared.

"I'm an investigator," he said, with the same settled air an adult would use when calling themselves a realtor or a hotel manager. "I've been looking into the assault of Katie Rossiter. Occurred during a playoff game for lacrosse last month. Police seem to think the rapist belonged to the other school."

"You have some reason to disagree?" Joan asked.

"Because Katie does, reportedly." He tapped his pen against the desk. "Though she can't explain her certainty. And no one lends much credence to her intuition, especially not since she attempted suicide two weeks ago."

"Wait, I heard about that." Whispers about both incidents had reached Joan while she was being homeschooled, though none of the whispers had included the name of the victim. "God, poor girl."

"Mm." He added another swirl to the design. "All it takes is an impression of instability, and everything you say will forever be marred by a shadow of doubt."

"Why do I feel like you're speaking from experience?" There was a note of derision she didn't mean to include. Her brother said the other day she'd been relearning how to talk to humans ever since she got out of the hospital, and still had a ways to go.

"I've figured you out, you know," he said, muscles of his back tense, his eyes fixed on the carpet. Joan didn't say a word. "Proved slightly difficult at first. Nothing I observed supports you being the type of person to blame the world for your disability. You take exception because they feel sorry for you. No, they pity you. Not only because you lost a limb, but because you did it trying to save someone, and you failed. That's why it infuriates you so much. If they treated you the same, you could forget. If they treated you worse, you could take that as the punishment you feel you deserve."

"That's not true," she said.

"Isn't it?" He stood abruptly, the chair screeching against the surface of the floor, and he turned on his heel. 

Mr. Abreu, who took over at lunchtimes to give Bell a break, looked up from the papers he was grading. "Guys," he said. "Hey, what's up? What's going on?"

Joan crumpled her brown bag with two hands and threw it against the wall. 

"Okay, you can go ahead and pick that up now."

~

Joan hit the floor hip first, breath expelling from her in a whoosh. The cold, night air went right through her sweat-soaked t-shirt. She kept remembering the last time she stood on her own two feet, the seconds before the floor gave way beneath her, the hand that let go of hers.

Last night she'd shaken off the nightmare and pulled herself up before anyone had noticed. Same with the night before that, and the night before that.

Joan grabbed the bed frame, and her hand slipped.

The door opened, her mother at the other side. "Joanie?"

Joan burst into tears.

~

The silent lunches continued for two more days. That afternoon, she walked out the main doors to the teachers parking lot where her dad came to pick her up, and she saw a girl untangling the chain of an electric blue mountain bike. Her hair was platinum blonde with several inches of grown-out black roots. Her thumbs poked through the cuffs of her unseasonable long-sleeved shirt. The kids walking by gave her the same sidelong glances Joan had been getting for months.

An outside force seemed to propel Joan forward. The girl backed up two steps as Joan approached, her eyes widening. 

"You're Katie Rossiter, right? Hi. I'm Joan."

~

"It was a class ring," Joan said, standing at his back. "She didn't remember until weeks later because of the concussion he gave her, but she always knew in her gut he was a classmate. She just couldn't explain it."

He turned, his nose scrunched up and his forehead wrinkled, pensive, and Bell entered the room. "Go on to your row, Joan. Let's not make waves on our last day, okay?"

Sherlock beckoned, and she drew closer. "Over the course of the last few days," he said quietly, "I've gradually gained the impression that you would benefit from aiding in my investigations. Do you concur?"

Joan took her seat. He hunched over further and further until his chin almost reached his desk. She flung a pencil at his back, forcing him to turn around.

"Who talks like that," she said. 

He grinned, big and wide.


End file.
